Or rather, that is the first half of life.
When did the change come? When did the outer limits of his world turn their corner and begin moving inexorably toward their terminal convergence?
Abacus had no idea.
Not long after his children had grown and moved on, perhaps. Certainly, before Polly died. Yes, it was likely at some point during those years when, without their knowing it, her time had begun to run out while he, in the so-called prime of life, went blithely on about his business.
The manner in which the convergence takes you by surprise, that is the cruelest part. And yet it’s almost unavoidable. For at the moment when the turning begins, the two opposing rays of your life are so far from each other you could never discern the change in their trajectory. And in those first years, as the rays begin to angle inward, the world still seems so open, you have no reason to suspect its diminishment.
But one day, one day years after the convergence has begun, you cannot only sense the inward trajectory of the walls, you can begin to see the terminal point in the offing even as the terrain that remains before you begins to shrink at an accelerating pace.
In those golden years of his late twenties, shortly after arriving in New York, Abacus had made three great friends. Two men and a woman, they were the hardiest of companions, fellow adventurers of the mind and spirit. Side by side, they had navigated the waters of life with a reasonable diligence and their fair share of aplomb. But in just these last five years, the first had been stricken with blindness, the second with emphysema, and the third with dementia. How varied their lot, you might be tempted to observe: the loss of sight, of lung capacity, of cognition. When in reality, the three infirmities amount to the same sentence: the narrowing of life at the far tip of the diamond. Step by step, the stomping grounds of these friends had shrunk from the world itself, to their country, to their county, to their home, and finally to a single room where, blinded, breathless, forgetful, they are destined to end their days.
Though Abacus had no infirmities to speak of yet, his world too was shrinking. He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. And then this . . .
This!
This extraordinary turn of events.
A little boy from Nebraska appears at his doorstep with a gentle demeanor and a fantastical tale. A tale not from a leather-bound tome, mind you. Not from an epic poem written in an unspoken language. Not from an archive or athenaeum. But from life itself.
How easily we forget—we in the business of storytelling—that life was the point all along. A mother who has vanished, a father who has failed, a brother who is determined. A journey from the prairies into the city by means of a boxcar with a vagabond named Ulysses. Thence to a railroad track suspended over the city as surely as Valhalla is suspended in the clouds. And there, the boy, Ulysses, and he, having sat down by a campfire as ancient as the ways of man, began—
—It’s time, said Ulysses.
—What’s that? said Abacus. Time?
—If you’re still coming.
—I’m coming! he said. Here I come!
Rising to his feet in a copse of woods twenty miles west of Kansas City, Abacus scrambled through the underbrush in the dark, tearing the pocket from his seersucker jacket. Breathlessly, he followed Ulysses through the break in the trees, up the embankment, and into the boxcar that was destined to take them who knows where.
Billy
Emmett was asleep. Billy could tell that Emmett was asleep because he was snoring. Emmett didn’t snore as loudly as their father used to snore, but he snored loudly enough that you could tell when he was sleeping.
Quietly, Billy slipped out from under the covers and climbed down onto the rug. Reaching under the bed, he found his backpack, opened the upper flap, and removed his army surplus flashlight. Being careful to point the beam at the rug—so he wouldn’t wake his brother—Billy switched the flashlight on. Then removing Professor Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers, he turned to chapter twenty-five and took up his pencil.
If Billy were going to start at the very beginning, he would go back to the twelfth of December 1935, the day that Emmett was born. That was two years after their father and mother had married in Boston and moved to Nebraska. It was during the Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt was president, and Sally was almost one year old.
But Billy wasn’t going to start at the very beginning. He was going to start in medias res. The hard part, as Billy had explained to Emmett in the train station in Lewis, was knowing where the middle was.